Paradise Park resident Thomas Lord speaks about damage to his Highlands mobile home by the storm. The rear of his home was ripped away. / THOMAS P. COSTELLO/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Sandy's destruction of Paradise Park, a mobile home community in Highlands, NJ, on Friday, Nov. 2. / Tanya Breen/Staff Photographer

More

ADVERTISEMENT

Sitting on a narrow spit of land between the Atlantic Ocean and Little Egg Harbor, the Long Beach Island Trailer Park was one of New Jersey’s earliest victims of superstorm Sandy. The powerful storm pushed many of the community’s manufactured homes onto their sides; many others were partially submerged.

Some 60 miles up the coast, at Sandy Hook Bay, the Paradise Park community of 56 manufactured homes fared no better. There is no power, water or gas to the area, and its tenants have been displaced from flattened, upended homes, said Lori Dibble, president of the homeowners association.

These are the unfortunate outliers. Manufactured home communities in the region, many of them inland, were largely spared the destruction Sandy delivered to homes on Oct. 29, according to park managers in the area.

“Homestead Run is solid,” said the property manager, Renee McNally. “We were totally blessed.”

Something providential must have been at work: Homestead Run sits next to the Toms River, which McNally said did not rise during the storm, thus sparing its 700 seniors. It lost power for about 10 hours the night before Sandy, but the lights stayed on through the storm, McNally said. Sandy’s powerful gusts brought down a couple of trees, she said, but not one of the 461 homes were shifted off their bases, said Anthony Licata, the head of maintenance.

“It may have been a different story if they’d been closer to the ocean,” he said.

At least two other components worked in homeowners’ favor at Homestead Run and other dry, still-grounded communities: Mobile and manufactured homes are often raised at least two to three feet off the ground, and they are braced with hurricane tie-downs, designed to withstand high winds, as the name suggests, Licata said.

(Page 2 of 3)

“We have a lot of people who ask, ‘How do they hold up in a storm?’ We say, ‘Well, they’re driven down the road at 65 mph and the siding stays on,’ ” said Carrianne Jones, the manager at Woodlawn Village in Eatontown, referring to the process of transporting manufactured homes on highways.

Jones said her community, which includes a mix of newer and older homes, had no problems. She attributed the lack of damage to the efforts of the owners to maintain their homes and the park being proactive with tree trimming.

At Shore Acres Mobile Home Park in Manasquan, about a half-dozen homes’ roofs were damaged by downed tree limbs, manager Patty Nielsen said. One home’s rear half was crushed by a felled tree, she said, which “absolutely devastated their unit.”

Outside of that, the worst trouble the community had was finding contractors to clear trees from the roads, Nielsen said.

“We were very fortunate,” she said. “We suffered minor damage compared to what the rest of Manasquan had.”

Gary Miller, treasurer of the Manufactured Homeowners Association of New Jersey, said his community, Maple Glen in Jackson, lost more power during the nor’easter that followed Sandy. Damage was minimal because the community is protected by large trees that stood up to the storm’s winds. He was only aware of one other community, Manahawkin Trailer Park in Stafford, that suffered extensive damage.

(Page 3 of 3)

Mobile and manufactured homes are not all that different from standard brick-and-mortar homes, Miller said.

“If a tree falls on your bedroom, you’re going to rebuild,” he said. “Just like a regular house, we have the same problems.”

It can become particularly difficult rebuilding manufactured home communities because typically one person owns the home itself, while another owns the land on which the structure sits, said Dibble, who is also the legislative and policy representative for the homeowners association.

“When you talk about rebuilding after a hurricane it’s a complicated situation because you have to work hand in hand with the community owners,” she said.

And if both sides agree to rebuild, they still have to contend with the local laws, which vary from municipality to municipality, Dibble said. In many cases the building standards are more strict than when the manufactured home community was originally built.

“If we were to rebuild in Highlands, we would have to have a willing community, to a willing community owner and we would have to rebuild to (a) stringent building standard,” she said.

Dibble said there are programs available to help replace aging manufactured homes, but many of these require some sort of tenure security for residents, such as the park owners offering long-term leases or the park being owned by residents.

Generally, the park owner is responsible to return the community to the form where the manufactured homeowners, who have the land lease, can use it, said Donna Blaze, chief executive officer of the Affordable Home Alliance. Her organization owns a manufactured home park, Pine Tree Manufactured Home Park in Eatontown, which suffered only minor damage.

“If I can’t for catastrophic reasons, I would have to terminate the lease and free the tenant to look elsewhere.”